Landing Page Mistakes to Avoid

Your landing page is the first thing that most of your prospective customers will see when they visit your website. If you are relying primarily on paid search, display advertising or PPC to bring visitors to your website, then each of those visitors costs you money, so having a poorly designed landing page is an expensive mistake.

The most successful affiliate marketers have turned designing an effective landing page into a precise science. They know the formula, they can replicate it reliably, and they understand what works and what drives visitors away. Are you making any of these common landing page mistakes?

Mistake 1: Weak (or missing) headlines

The headline should be the first thing that your visitors see, and it should make it clear, at a glance, what you are offering. A missing headline, or one that provides a confusing or weak value proposition, won’t entice your visitors to read further.

Mistake 2: Hiding your sales copy on another page

It’s a good idea to keep your landing page clean and simple, but it is possible to take that idea too far. Many affiliate marketers make the mistake of creating landing pages that contain nothing but a headline and a large image, hoping that visitors will be intrigued enough to click the “Buy Now” or “Learn More” buttons on the page. Most people won’t do this. Show your visitors everything they need to know on your landing page, otherwise you’ll lose them.

Mistake 3: Only one call to action

Including a call to action at the bottom of your page is essential, but it’s important to remember that not all of your visitors will make it to the bottom of the page. Some customers will want to make a purchase as soon as they see your headline, and others may get distracted midway through reading your sales pitch. Include calls to action throughout your sales copy, to maximise your chances of closing the sale.

Mistake 4: Providing too many options

This mistake comes in several forms. Some marketers include too many calls to action, asking their visitors to like them on social media, download the free trial, subscribe to the mailing list, bookmark the page, and become a customer. By the time the visitor is finished considering all those requests, they feel like they’ve just spent an hour with a pushy salesman, and they won’t think highly of your brand.

The other version of “too many options” is when you offer too many versions of your product. Focus each sales page on one product. Offering different sizes and colours is fine, but if you confuse the matter by offering products with different features then you will lose the customer. This is known as the paradox of choice. If a customer is given a bewildering array of choices, they won’t be happy with any of them, and they’ll choose nothing at all.

Mistake 5: Unprofessional design

Make sure that your page looks good on all platforms, including mobile devices. At a bare minimum your site should render well in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari at all screen resolutions from 1024×768 upwards, as well as on mobile devices. If your site isn’t cross-browser and cross device compatible, hire a designer and sort that out. There is no good excuse for having a website that looks ugly in any browser.

Crispin Jones writes for ClickSure, one of the world’s best converting affiliate networks. Crispin writes about a number of topics around affiliate marketing.